We are excited to introduce the creatives behind Australia Ensemble's upcoming staging of Stravinsky's A Solider's Tale.
Imara Savage | Director
Imara Savage is a director and dramaturg with a cross disciplinary practice, working across opera, ballet, film, installation, theatre & performance art in both the Australian and international festival market and within State theatre companies.
Imara is the currently undertaking a creative residency with Sydney Chamber Opera focusing on the creation of new work alongside designer Elizabeth Gadsby, lighting designer/director Alexander Berlage and filmmaker Mike Daly. Imara was the resident director at Sydney Theatre Company between 2016-2018 and the Richard Wherret Fellow in 2014. She was the first Australian woman to have a premiere production of a new work in the Roslyn Packer Theatre with her acclaimed adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s SAINT JOAN. This production featured Sarah Snook in the title role and received multiple Helpmann nominations.
Other credits include; Puccini’s SUOR ANGELICA (IL TRITTICO) (Opera Australia); Andrew Upton’s THE SEAGULL, Caryl Churchill’s TOP GIRLS, Andrew Bovell’s AFTER DINNER, Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL, Moira Buffini’s DINNER, Colm Toibin’s THE TESTAMENT OF MARY, and Noel Coward’s HAYFEVER (Sydney Theatre Company); Elliott Gyger’s FLY AWAY PETER (adapted from the novel by David Malouf), IN THE PENAL COLONY, and Benjamin Britten's OWEN WINGRAVE (Sydney Chamber Opera).
In 2022, Imara directed the world premiere of Mary Finsterer and Tom Wright’s ANTARCTICA, presented by SCO and leading Dutch new music ensemble Asko|Schönberg in the Holland Festival (June, Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ, Amsterdam), followed by a second season at the 2023 Sydney Festival. In 2022 the same creative team presented an Australian-first staging of Benjamin Britten’s Canticles, interwoven with the Australian premiere of Sydney-born composer Luke Styles’ response to them, AWAKENING SHADOW, in a co-presentation with Carriageworks. This award-winning creative team collaborated in 2019 for the SCO/Sydney Festival production of Kaija Saariaho’s LA PASSION DE SIMONE, described by Time Out as “bold, uncompromising and musically spectacular… extraordinarily rich and rewarding.”
Paul Fitzsimon | Conductor
Paul Fitzsimon is an Australian conductor who has established a career across operatic, symphonic, contemporary, choral, and ballet repertoire. He currently holds the position since 2019 of Chorus Master and a resident conductor at Opera Australia, where he has conducted performances in the Sydney Opera House of La Traviata, Don Giovannni, La bohéme, and The Merry Widow.
Paul studied Piano Performance at The University of Melbourne and studied conducting through the Symphony Australia Development Program before being appointed Assistant Conductor of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2007. He spent almost five years living in Europe, first as a Masters student in Orchestral Conducting at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and then at Opera Graz as Assistant to the Chief Conductor. He has conducted orchestras such as the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in Stockhausen’s Gruppen, the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris in 2014 and 2016, and the Hamburg Ballet in Baden-Baden as well as, in Australia, the Sydney Symphony, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and Canberra Symphony Orchestra.
Upcoming performances in 2025 include performances with Opera Australia of La bohème in the Sydney Opera House as well as Mozart’s Requiem in Sydney Recital Hall.
Michael Hankin | Set and Costume Designer
Michael Hankin is a multi-award-winning set designer whose practice encompasses theatre, opera, dance, and film.
Dance & Opera: Il Trittico (Opera Australia); The Lighthouse and In the Penal Colony (Sydney Chamber Opera); 247 Days (Chunky Move/Malthouse Theatre); and You Animal You and Flock (Force Majeure).
Theatre: On The Beach and Jumpy (STC); Golden Blood (Griffin, STC, and MTC); Amplified, Into The Woods, The Boomkak Panto, Wayside Bride, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, The Glass Menagerie, Hir, Angels in America, Ghosts, Ivanov, Twelfth Night, The Sugarhouse, The Great Fire, Mark Colvin’s Kidney, and The Darkroom (Belvoir St Theatre); Ugly Mugs (Griffin Theatre); The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Othello (Bell Shakespeare); Memorial (Barbican Centre); Insane Animals (Manchester’s Home Theatre); The Aspirations of Daise Morrow and Tartuffe (Brink Productions); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Queen’s Nanny, and Liberty Equality Fraternity (Ensemble Theatre); A Model Murder (Sydney Festival); and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Theatre Royal).
Film & Television: Michael was art director for Ireland’s 2020 Eurovision entry, challenge designer for Survivor Australia (S6), and weapons designer/co-ordinator for Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Michael trained at NIDA, where he later returned to teach as an Associate Lecturer of Design.
Mitch Riley | Actor
Mitch Riley is a versatile artist, interpreting and devising works in opera, theatre, music and clowning. His performances have been critically acclaimed, often noting his “unique vocal timbre” and “astonishing physical abilities”.
Recent work includes Pierrot lunaire (Sydney Chamber Opera/Ensemble Offspring), Clouds still know our names (New Old Now dance company), Ruins (Clockfire Theatre) and Midnight Static (BackStage Music).
He is an artistic associate of Sydney Chamber Opera and has performed as a soloist in nearly twenty of the company’s productions, including major works by György Kurtág, Pascal Dusapin and Peter Maxwell-Davies, and new works by Australia composers Jack Symonds, Elliott Gyger, Bree van Reyk, Michael Smetanin and Huw Belling.
Mitch studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (classical voice) and the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School. He also trained extensively in clowning, puppetry and object theatre whilst living in France.
Mitch teaches French diction and stagecraft at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Leon Bowers | Visual Artist
Leon Bowers (b. 1981) is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice is grounded in a lifelong commitment to drawing and painting. After 15 years living and working in London, he returned to Australia to complete a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, graduating with first-class honours in 2025.
Developed through years of sustained daily drawing, his work is characterised by an energised, dextrous gesture and close attentiveness to the seductive charge of images. Working from digital photographs and lived observation, Bowers paints subjects that hover between allure and latent unease. Resisting distinctions between high and low culture, his paintings examine figuration through banal objects and intimate scenes, where personal memory, cultural debris and art-historical reference converge.
